


Glory And Gore

by GreyBlueSkies21



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I Blame Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-26 04:06:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13849734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyBlueSkies21/pseuds/GreyBlueSkies21
Summary: Polly ignored their mother's words and stories and bedtime lessons. But Betty?Betty held on to them, threaded them through her skin and lived by every word. It was her silent 'fuck you' to the world, a teenage rebellion for the perfect girl with quick eyes and a sharp tongue.She is and always will be, a snake, in essence and in form. This is something she could no longer ignore.





	Glory And Gore

**Author's Note:**

> Dark Betty is going to wreck me this season. 
> 
>  
> 
> Enjoy :)

* * *

 

 

 _And I've been sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool_  
_For a while now,                                                                       Drowning my thoughts out with the sounds_

_Halsey - Young God_

 

* * *

 

 

Her mother's bedtime stories didn't quite teach the morals that young children should know. They were full of wit and suspicion and old lives she wouldn't talk about. They spoke of suspicion and being wary. They said that someone was always out to get you. Keep your friends close and enemies closer.

 

 

Knowledge is power, and power makes you a god. Lay low and let no one know you have it.

 

 

Be the first to strike and the last to leave.

 

 

(Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera)

 

 

Polly ignored them. She defied, she rebelled, she refused to become anything close to what their mother was.

 

 

But Betty? She listened. She kept those words seeded in her mind, she found secrets and wrote them up with a knife point sharp pen. She soaked up her mother's stories and found the truth while Alice found lies. She became her own person, her own woman, a looming shadow over the Cooper house.

 

 

She kept her friends close and her enemies at arm's reach, ready to use or dispel when needed. She wrote with a smile and quick eyes, tapped her fingers on keys till they were raw and prayed when her stories hit the presses, bastards would bleed.

 

 

They called her a bulldog. (Which was ironic, with it being the school mascot and everything.)

 

 

But they were wrong. She was a viper, a snake that shed its skin and became whatever the needed to be. When she sank her fangs into something she didn't let go.

 

 

She was a snake, a _serpent_ , just like her mother, and she made sure everyone new it. She tore apart the Lodge's misdeeds and left Chic to roast, dug up sins and secrets stung them up in newspapers like stained sheets.

 

 

It was vicious and quick.

 

 

It was true, every single speck of it.

 

 

She wrote of Serpent struggle and drew herself forward, shrugged a leather jacket on her shoulders and wore her mother's defiance in the only way she knew how.

 

 

She used statues and late-night escapades in cabins and webcams and trailers as her base point. She lived through their struggle and used it to find her own holy ground.

 

 

Her palms were stained, brown with dirt, red with blood, and black with ink, drowned in maple syrup and the damp of cold stone and wet wigs.

 

 

She could not wash them clean, sins are not easily washed away, and holy water would be nothing if not ironic. She could not erase the stains, she would not, so she clenched her hands into fists and dug fingernails into soft skin, crescent moon scars that marked her to overflowing.

 

 

She had been soft all her life. Perfect and good.

 

 

She would never cruel or evil, but she could do this, be sharp, be hard. She could be a hurricane, she could watch and wait and write, hold the world accountable for its foul truths and twisted ironies in the most imperfect of manners.

 

 

She could wear leather jackets and hold lies on a bitter tongue. She could be wary and suspicious. Knowledge was power and she had enough of it to know what to be, where to be it and how to be it.

 

 

She wrote stories and articles and give smirks when her mother looked away. She kissed her boyfriend senseless and smoked a cigarette just because she could.

 

 

Her mother told her stories. Of perfect, cautions girls.

 

 

She wrote her own stories.

 

 

Of a girl with a quick, sharp tongue who learns to sharpen it.

 

 

Her mother told what to be and how to be.

 

 

But she _became_ all on her own.

 

 


End file.
